In recent years, an electronic display has played an extremely important role in the society of information, and has widely been used in various fields regardless of both the industrial fields and consumer fields. The electronic display converts an electric signal outputted from electronic equipment to an optical information signal visually recognized by human. There have been known displays, as an ordinary electronic display, such as a cathode-ray tube display (CRT), a plasma display (PDP), an electroluminescent display (ELD), a liquid crystal display (LCD) referred to as a receptor type, and an electrochemical display (ECD).
Also, in recent years, the needs of the society to a low profile and light display capable of being driven with low voltage as well as with low power consumption has zoomed while a large number of compact, light and power-saved displays have been developed in association with rapid progress in IC and LSI. Further, it has been strongly desired to develop a display capable of supporting abrupt increase of an amount of information to be processed. Especially, with progress in multimedia technology, the electronic display has increased in importance as an indispensable item for accessing cyber space, and a larger size of screen with higher resolution has been desired further more strongly.
However, an image transfer system in the conventional type of electronic display is based on a scanning line system for continuously transferring image data at preset resolution as well as with a preset number of scanning lines, and this conventional type of display can not basically support a case where a size of a screen is arbitrarily changed for changing the resolution (the number of display elements in the lateral direction) as well as the number of scanning lines (the number of display elements in the longitudinal direction), and for this reason, the idea itself that the size of a screen can arbitrarily be changed by a user is impossible to come up in maker's mind.
For example, even when the size of a screen is made larger and resolution (the number of display elements in the lateral direction) and the number of scanning lines (the number of display elements in the longitudinal direction) are increased, the resolution and the number of scanning lines of image data to be sent with the scanning line system remain the same, so that image display using the entire screen is impossible. Also, when an image is to be displayed, the image is resultantly displayed on a part of the screen corresponding to the resolution as well as to the number of scanning lines of the transferred image data. In other words, even when the size of a screen is made larger, resolution of an image to be displayed on the screen can not be made higher.